After 3 months on the Netwalker, I'm giving it up and I'm returning to the old Zaurus.

The two major reasons are that the Netwalker has a very bad keyboard (compared to the very good Zaurus one), and that the Netwalker standy autonomy is pretty ridiculous : about 5 days (and obviously less if you use the Netwalker !). By comparison, the Zaurus standby autonomy was more that a month.

Short standby autonomy can be considered as "normal" for cell phone, since the phone must power its antenna even when being in standby. But for a mobile computer ? Even my 4-year-old basic cell phone still has more than 10 days of standby autonomy !

In addition, the Netwalker is bigger and heavier. Although it has no mobile parts, it is noisy and emits a little "bzzz", even in standby. It has an inaccurate touchscreen, with unreliable double clicks. It uses specific power connector, and thus I was unable to connect it to my solar panel.

FInally, the software procided by Sharp are not optimized, in term of user interface, but also of optimization. All graphical operation (excepted video) are performed in software mode, since no driver are provided. Consequently, the Netwalker seems as slow as the Zaurus. For instance, the calendar program provided on the Netwalker (Mozilla Sunbird) is incredibly slow, MUCH slower than the Zaurus calendar.

Conclusion : the Netwalker is good for video and surfing (without typing), but the Zaurus is still better for everything else : taking notes, playing games, coding, agenda and addressbook... But I don't like video, and I not so dependent to Internet that I cannot wait until being at home for that. So the choice is easy !

After 3 months on the Netwalker, I'm giving it up and I'm returning to the old Zaurus.

The two major reasons are that the Netwalker has a very bad keyboard (compared to the very good Zaurus one), and that the Netwalker standy autonomy is pretty ridiculous : about 5 days (and obviously less if you use the Netwalker !). By comparison, the Zaurus standby autonomy was more that a month.

Short standby autonomy can be considered as "normal" for cell phone, since the phone must power its antenna even when being in standby. But for a mobile computer ? Even my 4-year-old basic cell phone still has more than 10 days of standby autonomy !

In addition, the Netwalker is bigger and heavier. Although it has no mobile parts, it is noisy and emits a little "bzzz", even in standby. It has an inaccurate touchscreen, with unreliable double clicks. It uses specific power connector, and thus I was unable to connect it to my solar panel.

FInally, the software procided by Sharp are not optimized, in term of user interface, but also of optimization. All graphical operation (excepted video) are performed in software mode, since no driver are provided. Consequently, the Netwalker seems as slow as the Zaurus. For instance, the calendar program provided on the Netwalker (Mozilla Sunbird) is incredibly slow, MUCH slower than the Zaurus calendar.

Conclusion : the Netwalker is good for video and surfing (without typing), but the Zaurus is still better for everything else : taking notes, playing games, coding, agenda and addressbook... But I don't like video, and I not so dependent to Internet that I cannot wait until being at home for that. So the choice is easy !

Good luck for people that are still enduring the Netwalker.

As ArchiMark said, sorry to hear that. But to each his own and you have to use the machine that meets your needs. If that's the Z then go ahead.

As for the points you mention - I partially concur with you on the keyboard. It is weird and takes time to get used to and the more frequently you use it, the better you'll get along with it. At least that was true for me.

The standby time is pretty low, agreed. I recently woke up the device after it had been suspended for two or three days and even though the battery was full when I entered standby, it was very low (16%) after coming out of standby. The Zaurus, cell phones and even some x86 MIDs (Viliv S5, UMID M1, probably others) have much better standby times so there certainly is room for improvement and examples of what can be achieved. Maybe the culprit can be discovered, I suspected the WiFi but as the device disconnects upon standby I don't believe this to be true.

As for the size and weight, again, to each his own. I have no problem with that as it fits in my jacket's pocket still and the larger screen and keyboard make the device easier to work with for me. I never use the touchscreen but have discovered a little inaccuracy as you said. The non-standard power connector is a shame. The Zaurus uses a PSP-compatible connector and a very common input voltage so all of the PSP power accessories can be used with it. I haven't noticed any buzzing it but I know what you mean. Computers supposed to be silent (= inaudible) due to the lack of moving parts are not because of this electronic buzz.

Re: software, I agree. The default "stock" Ubuntu with its Gnome desktop is too heavy for the device, when using LXDE everything feels faster. It's a pity the Netwalker is using the framebuffer device for everything except video instead of a proper graphics driver as that makes all UI operations CPU-bound even though some could be off-loaded to the GPU and decreases performance substantially. I bet the device would become much faster (like 2x) with a proper driver but as of yet there is none I know of. This is noticeable in Sunbird but also in Firefox - scrolling web sites is slow. I haven't tried any games yet, but I have DOSBox installed. Going to give it a try.

Another complaint I have is the slow flash. IIRC read speed is about 10 MB/s, maybe even less, writes are presumably slower. Combined with the heavy software this makes the Netwalker slower than it could have been. Using the fastest microSD card one can get as boot device may improve this.

I mainly use my Netwalker for surfing, trying to avoid Flash if possible, and office work as well as a little coding and this has been going well. Everything else (address book, appointments, notes, gaming, multimedia, ...) is handled by my iPhone. I acknowledge the other issues you've had though.

I am very pleased with such review I am currently looking for zaurus and laptop replacement.I am considering netwalker because it has all I am using in zaurus and more memory (main reason for leaving zaurus behind).

I hope the "arm rush" in industry will cover dedicated driver for netwalker and it will become another zaurus like platform.I hope local forum gurus will get netwalker soon to give netwalker owners few valuable piecec of code.

Can any one of you compare netwalker against zaurus and eeepc?Lets say how netwalker places at different uses compared to zaurus c1000 with zubuntu/pdax and eeepc with 1Gb of memory and ubuntu?

sorry to have let merlin1 down, but I had been watching ebay for a while and a fujitsu u820 came up for sale, thought I'd lost out as I didn't hit reserve, asked the seller if he'd relist and explained why I wouldn't pay more than £400 for it seeing as how the UH900 is only £550, and he gave me a 2nd chance offer which I took.

good luck to merlin1 on finding a buyer, I think the right buyer would get a lot of enjoyment from it.

In light of all the above comments, Puppeee Linux is a lightweight, fast and feature complete OS designed especially for the EeePC's.Maybe with some tinkering by someone knowledgable enough, it could be ported to the NetWalker.I dual-boot it with Windows on my EeePC.It should really fly on the NetWalker compared to Ubuntu.

In light of all the above comments, Puppeee Linux is a lightweight, fast and feature complete OS designed especially for the EeePC's.Maybe with some tinkering by someone knowledgable enough, it could be ported to the NetWalker....It should really fly on the NetWalker compared to Ubuntu.

from my understanding application operation is slow because of lack of graphics drivers ... you'd need these drivers for faster application operation (I agree they might start faster on a lighter OS though)

However, Genesi's Efika MX Open Client also uses an i.MX515 CPU and possibly the same graphics chipset as the Netwalker. Not only are they successfully running Ubuntu 9.10 on it, they also claim to have a driver in the works which provides 2D acceleration:

If we can get this working on the Netwalker (or Sharp provides a working driver, perhaps using this as a base) this should put an end to the slow graphics performance we get thanks to fbdev.

The current source available from Genesi is an older release not containing the driver, and the modules are meant to be compiled against 2.6.31. Not sure how hard backporting to the Netwalker's kernel (2.6.28) would be, or whether it is possible to run 2.6.31 on it.

However, Genesi's Efika MX Open Client also uses an i.MX515 CPU and possibly the same graphics chipset as the Netwalker. Not only are they successfully running Ubuntu 9.10 on it, they also claim to have a driver in the works which provides 2D acceleration:

If we can get this working on the Netwalker (or Sharp provides a working driver, perhaps using this as a base) this should put an end to the slow graphics performance we get thanks to fbdev.

The current source available from Genesi is an older release not containing the driver, and the modules are meant to be compiled against 2.6.31. Not sure how hard backporting to the Netwalker's kernel (2.6.28) would be, or whether it is possible to run 2.6.31 on it.